Tuesday, August 19, 2003

The Inquirer: HavenCo's Gilbert & Sullivan Journey. [Hack the Planet] 9:39:52 PM    comment []

OWL flies as Web ontology language. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on Tuesday issued its Web Ontology Language, its acronym spelled and pronounced "OWL," as a W3C Candidate for Recommendation, meaning the organization is seeking more implementations of the language. [InfoWorld: Top News] 9:38:45 PM    comment []

Cryptome: Map of a Democratic Power System /B/H August 19, 2003. Mechanisms of an Oppressive State 1 /J August 19, 2003. MOS 1 Mechanisms of an Oppressive State 2 /J August 19, 2003. MOS 2 6:44:00 PM    comment []

crash different. I love my Mac so much that I'm happy to share this hillarious anti-mac clip. [via popdex] [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog] 6:41:55 PM    comment []

That's No Butterfly - That's A Mothra Ballot. Plastic::Politics::Politics: Okay, we've all laughed at Gary Coleman, Gallagher and Angelyne's candidacies. So let's take a look at the people who have a snowball's chance in Malibu of being the governor of California when the smoke clears. [Plastic: Most Recent] 6:36:31 PM    comment []

AfricaDotEdu: IT Opportunities and Higher Education in Africa. Edited by Maria A Beebe, Kouakou Koffi Magloire, Banji Oyeyinka and Madanmohan Rao. 1:25:14 PM    comment []

When Times Square flickered out below him, the pilot feared he was witnessing a terrorist attack. Beneath the suddenly dark canyons of Manhattan, subway trains lurched to a stop, stranding hundreds of thousands of rush-hour commuters. To a satellite in orbit, it must have looked like a major constellation was being snuffed out. First Toronto went black, then Rochester, Boston, and finally New York City. In just 13 minutes, one of the crowning achievements of industrial engineering - the computer-controlled power grid of the 80,000-square-mile Canada-United States Eastern Interconnection area - was toast. For the first time in decades, night held dominion over the cities of the Northeast, which were now without traffic signals, television, airport landing lights, elevators, and refrigeration. You might say that the cascading blackout of November 9, 1965 - eventually traced to a single overloaded relay in Ontario - was the dawn of the networked era. The moment the lights went out, 30 million people woke up to the fact that the apparently seamless scrim of modern life is stretched over an intricate and vulnerable technological infrastructure that transcends national borders. Now, 36 years later, in the halls of the Electric Power Research Institute, they've been calling the energy debacle in California the perfect storm. Founded during the national period of soul- searching that followed the failure of the grid in 1965, EPRI believes we still have not fully heard the message of that massive blackout. The underlying lesson of the current crisis, researchers at the institute believe, is that we need smarter methods of electricity generation, transmission, and delivery - not just more power. This isn't about stringing more wires, or rallying around to make today's technology work better, says EPRI's president, Kurt Yeager. That's trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. >From Steve Silberman's, The Energy Web, Wired, July 2001. 11:24:55 AM    comment []

Blaster worm attack a bust. A scheduled denial of service attack against Microsoft's main software update Web site did not materialize Saturday, as computers infected with the W32.Blaster worm failed to find their target. [InfoWorld: Top News] 7:42:30 AM    comment []

Lights Out on Deregulation. With and estimated 50 million Americans and Canadians left without power and in some cases water, common sense requires us to reflect on the absurdity of deregulation of public utilities. . . . . [Lessig Blog] 7:41:05 AM    comment []

A Scientist's Lifetime of Study into the Mysteries of Addiction. Dr. Nora Volkow, a research psychiatrist, has published hundreds of papers, including many on dopamine's relationship to addiction. By Mary Duenwald. [New York Times: Science] 7:37:27 AM    comment []

Orders please. Mr Tu Nguyen developed what he calls the Intelligent Pocket Order Delivering System to use in his family's restaurant business. It allows waiters to take orders on a wireless pocket computer and transmit them to the kitchen in a different language.Restaurants aren't the only ones who can use Mr. Nguyen's software. He said he designed it to benefit the whole service industry sector.This has also won him a $25,000 first prize in the Imagine Cup,a competition sponsored by Microsoft. High tech for old country food [Smart Mobs] 7:36:16 AM    comment []

Privacy advocates call for RFID regulation. A handful of technology and consumer privacy experts call for regulation of a controversial technology that's designed to wirelessly monitor everything from clothing to currency. [CNET News.com] 7:35:22 AM    comment []

Learning to Love PowerPoint. When artist and musician David Byrne first used PowerPoint, he found it limiting, inflexible and biased. But that's a small price to pay for ease and utility in a world where convenience beats quality every time. Part 1 of a two-part Wired magazine series. [Wired News] 7:34:34 AM    comment []

Mapping a Town in Neil Young Land. Neil Young's new album, chronicling a family in changing times, is full of beauty, hope, pathos and power. By Neil Strauss. [New York Times: Business] 7:33:26 AM    comment []

College Degrees Lose Their Magic in China: Graduates Flood the Job Market. By Peter S. Goodman, Washington Post. 7:31:15 AM    comment []

Are You a Good or a Bad Worm?. A new worm being circulated on the Internet is designed to kill MSBlaster, the worm that wreaked havoc on computers last week. Some security officials are not amused. By Michelle Delio. [Wired News] 7:20:41 AM    comment []

KnowledgeContext A 501(c)(3) Educational Non-Profit Corporation. We give young people the ability to make the best choices in a world where technologies change with greater and greater speed. (We illustrate with a comic strip) Schools in Santa Cruz, Berkeley, and San Jose have used our classroom curriculum, which explains how to understand and evaluate technology. The cost? It's free -- you can access all materials right here on this site. 3:04:21 AM    comment []